“Martha, akin to ballet’s Giselle, is an iconic figure broken on the wheel of the American West.”

Norte Maar is pleased to present Martha (The Searchers) a new ballet by Julia K Gleich with décor by Elana Herzog. A modern Western, the ballet’s title character Martha is inspired by one created by American novelist Alan Le May and brought to the big screen by director John Ford in The Searchers (1956). Set in the 1860s Southwest territories of the United States, audiences will be introduced to the title role of Martha (played by multiple female leads). Other narratives include The Confederate, The Comanche, Britt Johnson (c.1840-1871), Cynthia Ann Parker or Nadua (c.1825-1871) and Quanah Parker (c.1845-1911) and The Settlers.

In Gleich’s choreography Martha is a composite of both courageous and tragic women in history. Her struggles and experiences are central to the ballet, offering an alternative narrative to the roles women played in an unsettled West. For Gleich’s ballet visual artist Elana Herzog captures the palette of the Southwest and John Ford’s cinematography, using fabric remnants that suggest landscapes contrasting with the symbols of domesticity—aprons and blankets, carpets and rugs. Herzog designs a confusion of contexts, bringing the domestic into the theater with hints of scale of vast landscape. She creates worlds in which all the identities of Martha can be viewed—all just as rough, tough, and textured as the West once was.